Cassi bit her lip.
“The ideal relationship with a woman,” said Bentworth, “would be one month long. Then, puff, she’d disappear and another one would take her place. That would be perfect.”
“But you were married.”
“Yeah, I was married. Only lasted a year. I just about killed the broad. All she did was complain.”
“Are you living with someone now?”
“No. That’s why I’m here. The day before they picked me up, she walked out. I’d only known her for a couple of weeks, but she met some other guy and took off. That’s why I want to get out of here for the weekend. She’s still got a key to my apartment. I’m afraid she might clean me out.”
“Why not call a friend and have him change the lock?” said Cassi.
“There’s nobody I can trust,” said Bentworth, standing up. “Look, are you going to give me a weekend pass or is all this bull for nothing?”
“I’ll bring it up at the next team meeting,” said Cassi. “We’ll discuss it.”
Bentworth leaned over the desk. “The only thing I’ve learned in all my time in the hospital is that I hate psychiatrists. They think they’re so goddamned smart, but they’re not. They’re a hell of a lot crazier than I am.”
Cassi returned his stare, noticing how cold his eyes had become. The thought went thought her mind that Colonel Bentworth should be committed. Then she remembered he was.
Cassi knocked on the doorjamb of Robert’s tiny office. As he looked up from his binocular scope, his face broke into a broad and infectious smile. He jumped up so quickly to hug Cassi that his chair sped back on its wheels to the opposite wall.
“You look down,” said Robert examining her. “What’s wrong?”
Cassi looked away. She had had enough talk in the past few hours. “I’m just exhausted. I thought psychiatry was going to be so easy.”
“Then maybe you should transfer back to pathology,” said Robert as he pulled out a chair for Cassi. Leaning forward, he rested his hands on her knees. If any other man had done so, Cassi would have been annoyed, but she was comforted by Robert’s gesture.
“What can I get for you? Coffee? Orange juice? Anything?”
Cassi shook her head. “I wish you could give me a good night’s sleep. I’m beat, and I have to go to a party tonight at Doctor Ballantine’s home in Manchester.”
“Wonderful,” cooed Robert. “What are you going to wear?”
Cassi rolled her eyes in disbelief, saying she hadn’t given it a moment’s thought, at which point Robert, who had some knowledge of Cassi’s wardrobe, made several suggestions. Cassi interrupted to say that she’d come to hear about the autopsy, not for his fashion advice.
Robert made an exaggerated expression of being hurt and said, “The only thing that you come up here for is business. I can remember when we used to be friends.”
Cassi reached out to give Robert a friendly shake, but he eluded her by pushing back on his chair, which glided smoothly out of the way. They both laughed. Cassi sighed and realized she felt better than she had all day. Robert was like a tonic.
“Did your husband tell you he saved me at the last surgical death conference?”
“No,” said Cassi, surprised. She’d never mentioned Thomas’s antipathy to Robert, but it was all too obvious the few times they’d met.
“I made a big mistake. I got this crazy notion that the cardiac surgeons would be overjoyed to hear about SSD, and I decided to make a preliminary presentation at yesterday’s conference. It turned out to be the worst thing I could have done. I suppose I should have realized their egos are such that they’d consider the study a form of criticism. Anyway, when I finished talking, Ballantine started to chew me out until Thomas interrupted with an intelligent question. That sparked a few more questions, and what could have been a total disaster was averted. I did get a lot of heat this morning from the chief of pathology. It seems George Sherman had asked him to muzzle me in the future.”
Cassi was impressed and grateful for her husband’s intervention. She wondered why he hadn’t mentioned it to her until she remembered that she hadn’t given Thomas a chance. She’d brought up her eye surgery the second she’d seen him.
“Maybe I’ll have to take back some of the nasty things I’ve said about your husband,” added Robert.
There was an awkward silence. Cassi did not want to get into a discussion of her own feelings just then.
“Well,” said Robert, rubbing his hands together enthusiastically. “To work! As I said on the phone, I think I found a new SSD case.”
“Cyanotic like the last?” asked Cassi, eager to change the subject.
“Nope,” said Robert. “Come on, I want to show you.”
He leaped to his feet and dragged Cassi out of his office and into one of the autopsy rooms. A young, light-skinned black was laid out on the stainless steel table. The standard Y autopsy incision had been closed with heavy sutures and clumsy bites of tissue.
“I asked them to leave the body so you could see something,” said Robert, his voice echoing in the tiled room.
He let go of Cassi and inserted his thumb into Jeoffry Washington’s mouth, pulling down the lower jaw. “Look in here.”
With her hands behind her back, Cassi bent over and looked into the patient’s mouth. The tongue was a mangled piece of meat.
“Chewed hell out of it,” said Robert. “Obviously had one hell of a grand mal seizure.”
Cassi straightened up, a little sickened by what she’d seen. If this was an SSD case, he was the youngest yet.
“I think this one died of an arrhythmia,” said Robert, “but I won’t know for sure until the brain is fixed. You know, seeing this kind of case doesn’t help my anxiety about my own surgery.” Robert glanced over at Cassi.
“When are you going to have it?” she asked. Robert’s statement sounded definitive.
Robert smiled. “I told you, but you wouldn’t believe that I was going to get it over with. I’m being admitted tomorrow. What about yours?”
Cassi shook her head. “It’s not definite yet.”
“You chicken,” accused Robert with an air of superiority. “Why don’t you schedule yours for the day after tomorrow, too, so we can visit together in the recovery room.”
Cassi didn’t want to tell Robert about her difficulties talking the matter over with Thomas. Reluctantly her eyes went back to the corpse.
“How old?” asked Cassi, motioning toward Jeoffry Washington.
“Twenty-eight,” said Robert.
“God, that’s young,” said Cassi. “And it’s only been two weeks since the last case.”
“That’s a fact,” said Robert.
“You know, the more I think about it, the more disturbing these cases are.”
“Why do you think I’ve persisted?” said Robert.
“With the number you have now and the apparent increase in frequency, it’s getting harder and harder to ascribe the deaths to chance.”
“I agree,” said Robert. “Ever since the last, I’ve had the nagging suspicion that these deaths are more closely related than we suspect. The only trouble with that idea is that it suggests a specific agent, and as your husband pointed out, the deaths are physiologically different. The facts don’t fit the theory.”
Cassi walked around the table to Jeoffry’s right side. “Does this look swollen to you?” she said, reaching out and running her hand up the body’s forearm.
Robert bent down to look. “I don’t know. Where?”
Cassi pointed. “Was the patient on IV?”
“I think so,” said Robert. “I think he was on antibiotics for phlebitis.”
Cassi picked up Jeoffry’s left arm and looked at the IV site. It was red and puffy. “Just for interest’s sake, how about getting some sections of the vein where the IV was?”
“Anything if it will get you to come up and visit.”